`So Joe was picking your brains?’ I asked him.
`Walter and I became obsessed,’ Kelstein said. `We studied the history of money forging. It started the day after paper money was first introduced. It’s never gone away. We became experts. We carried on the interest after the war. We developed a loose relationship with the government. Finally, some
years ago, a Senate subcommittee commissioned a report from us. With all due modesty, I can claim that it became the Treasury’s anticounterfeiting bible. Your brother was familiar with it, of course. That’s why he was talking to Walter and me.’
`But what was he talking to you about?’ I said.
`Joe was a new broom,’ Kelstein said. `He was brought in to solve problems. He was a very talented man indeed. His job was to eradicate counterfeiting. Now, that’s an impossible job. Walter and I told him that. But he nearly succeeded. He thought hard, and he applied strokes of appealing simplicity. He just about halted all illicit printing within the United States.’
I sat in his crowded office and listened to the old guy. Kelstein had known Joe better than I had. He had shared Joe’s hopes and plans. Celebrated his successes. Sympathized over his setbacks. They had talked at length, animatedly, sparking off each other. The last time I had spoken to Joe face to face was very briefly after our mother’s funeral. I hadn’t asked him what he was doing. I’d just seen him as my older brother. Just seen him as Joe. I hadn’t seen the reality of his life as a senior agent, with hundreds of people under him, trusted by the White House to solve big problems, capable of impressing a smart old bird like Kelstein. I sat there in the armchair and felt bad. I’d lost something I never knew I’d had.
`His systems were brilliant,’ Kelstein said. `His analysis was acute. He targeted ink and paper. In the end, it all boils down to ink and paper, doesn’t it? If anybody bought the sort of ink or paper that could be used to forge a banknote, Joe’s people knew within hours. He swept people up within days. Inside the States, he reduced counterfeiting
activity by ninety per cent. And he tracked the remaining ten per cent so vigorously he got almost all of them before they’d even distributed the fakes. He impressed me greatly.’
`So what was the problem?’ I asked him.
Kelstein made a couple of precise little motions with his small white hands, like he was moving one scenario aside and introducing another.
`The problem lay abroad,’ he said. `Outside the United States. The situation there is very different. Did you know there are twice as many dollars outside the US as inside?’
I nodded. I summarized what Molly had told me about foreign holdings. The trust and the faith. The fear of a sudden collapse in the desirability of the dollar. Kelstein was nodding away like I was his student and he liked my thesis.
`Quite so,’ he said. `It’s more about politics than crime. In the end, a government’s primary duty is to defend the value of its currency. We have two hundred and sixty billion dollars abroad. The dollar is the unofficial currency of dozens of nations. In the new Russia, for instance, there are more dollars than rubles. In effect, it’s like Washington has raised a massive foreign loan. Raised any other way, that loan would cost us twenty-six billion dollars a year in interest payments alone. But this way, it costs us nothing at all except what we spend on printing pictures of dead politicians on little pieces of paper. That’s what it’s all about, Mr Reacher. Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into. So Joe’s job in reality was worth twenty-six billion dollars a year, to this country. And he pursued it with an energy appropriate to those high stakes.’
`So where was the problem?’ I said. ‘Geographically?’
`Two main places,’ Kelstein said. `First, the Middle East. Joe believed there was a plant in the Bekaa Valley that turned out fake hundreds which were practically perfect. But there was very little he could do about it. Have you been there?’